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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Distracted Again?

The air campaign in Syria against ISIL is not a distraction from attacking ISIL in Iraq.

While we have reason to worry about whether we can mesh all the moving parts across two incompatible fronts in Syria and Iraq to achieve victory over ISIL in a matter of years (without helping Assad survive), I find this criticism of our actions nonsense:

The U.S. air campaign has turned into an unfocused mess as the U.S. has shifted limited air strike resources to focus on Syria and a militarily meaningless and isolated small Syrian Kurdish enclave at Kobani at the expense of supporting Iraqi forces in Anbar and intensifying the air campaign against other Islamic State targets in Syria. As of October 20th, the United States had flown some 310 strikes in more than 2½ months of air activity in Iraq, and 231 in Syria. It began its strikes in Iraq, however, on August 8th, escalated to major air strikes on the Islamic state and an Al Qaeda element in Syria on September 22nd to October 3rd, and then let the Kurdish crisis in Kobani dominate the air campaign after October 5th.

Given the vast capabilities of our air power represented by our Air Force, Navy air and missile assets, Marine Corps aircraft, and even Army drones and armed helicopters, the notion that our Iraq fight is handicapped by a focus of our "limited air strike resources" on Kobani is nonsense.

Kobani is both a target of opportunity to kill jihadis as they expose themselves and a necessary fight to prevent ISIL from gaining a propaganda victory and to keep the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq in the fight against ISIL. This is no lack of focus.

If we aren't doing enough with air power in Iraq, it is because we have chosen to do less in Iraq.

Obviously, we have limits on our air strike assets. We haven't even begun to approach that limit.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.